our senior technology reporter chris vallance explains. them back in contention in the multi—billion—dollarour phones or laptops. classical computers, as they are called, simply can't — and lead to developments in medicine, for example. microsoft has been pursuing, by its own admission, to develop this new chip, it wanted to develop topological qubits — that relied upon discovering new materials that were capable of entering a topological you learn about in school — gas, liquid or solid. they also had to discover and use the elusive majorana particle. its existence has been only in theory until recently, and it remains controversial. in the race with its rivals, and ready to make it believes it's a question of years — not decades — before it's able to produce quantum computers capable a chip — as this one — which has eight topological qubits, and one that has thousands of times more qubits, which will be required if it's to do useful work. with a degree of caution — they say they will need to see more data before they're ready to say what this will mean for progress in the quantum computing